Online insurance marketplaces created under President Barack Obama's signature healthcare law are struggling to verify whether Americans who applied for government subsidies to purchase health insurance are actually qualified to receive them, a federal watchdog agency said on Tuesday, according to The Associated Press.
The Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Inspector General said in two reports that some "internal controls" were ineffective in verifying eligibility at the marketplaces run by the federal government, California, Connecticut and some other states, the AP reported.
"The deficiencies in internal controls that we identified may have limited the marketplaces' ability to prevent the use of inaccurate or fraudulent information when determining eligibility of applicants for enrollment in qualified health plans," the inspector general said, according to the AP.
The reports mark the second potential setback in two days to the 2010 healthcare law after the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday limited its mandate to provide universal contraceptive coverage for women, the AP reported.
"When Obamacare was passed, its chief architects told us they would have to pass the bill to find out what was in it," said Senator Orrin Hatch, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, according to the AP. "Today's report confirms what we knew was not included: safeguards to protect hard-earned taxpayer dollars from an incompetent bureaucracy."
The California marketplace had difficulties verifying citizenship and lawful presence, while the federal marketplace had difficulty verifying Social Security numbers, the inspector general said, the AP reported.
A companion report found that the federal and some state insurance marketplaces were unable, in their early months of operation, to resolve most inconsistencies between applicants' self-supplied information and data received through other federal sources, most commonly citizenship and income levels, according to the AP.
The federal marketplace was unable to resolve 2.6 million of 2.9 million inconsistencies as of the first quarter of 2014, because of systems not fully operational from October through December last year, the AP reported.
"These inconsistencies pertained to citizenship, national status, and lawful presence; income and employer-sponsored minimum essential coverage," the inspector general said, according to the AP.
